The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen Copyright © Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang 2016 Some Rights Reserved. First Edition, Web Export. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Publisher: Sutajio Ko-Usagi PTE LTD dba Kosagi, in Singapore. [email protected] Editor: Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang Design and Layout: Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang Translations: Celia Wang Translation errors: Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang Illustrations: Miran Lipovača Printed in the People’s Republic of China. ISBN 978-981-09-7459-6 To Gavin Zhao For opening my eyes to the real China. You have been a great teacher and mentor; I can do now what I once thought was impossible. I hope you win your battle with cancer, so that you can continue to mentor and inspire more people like me. 5 Contents Introduction 7 Why Point to Translate instead of Phonetic? 9 Using the Guide 10 About Technical Chinese 11 What’s in the Market (And What’s Not) 12 Pricing the Market and Haggling 14 Is it Fake? 15 Hours & When to Go 18 Internet & Helpful Apps 19 Tipping 20 Weather & Dressing 20 Point-to-Translate Guide: Components 23 Point-to-Translate Guide: Tools & Tooling 45 Point-to-Translate Guide: Sealing the Deal 55 Point-to-Translate Guide: Getting Around 67 Getting To Shenzhen, and Back Again 83 Visas 84 Getting to the Border 85 Which Border Crossing to Use? 87 Time-Saving Tips for Crossing the Border 90 China Customs 91 Maps 95 Acknowledgments 123 6 The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen bunnie 7 Introduction Introduction (shēn · zhèn) 8 The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen bunnie 9 Introduction Hello! This book is designed to help non-Mandarin speakers navigate the sprawling electronics markets of Shenzhen. The markets are locally referred to as the Hua Qiang Bei (HQB) markets, after the road that runs through the heart of the market. The concept behind this book is to provide a “point-to- translate” interaction that is structured according to a typical transaction in the market: 1. Specifying components 2. Specifying quantity and packaging 3. Payment and delivery 4. Remembering the vendor’s location The book also includes sections on what to expect, basic survival, and getting around. It does not cover topics such as eating, drinking, local attractions, places to stay, or making friends with the locals, as most basic travel guides for the area already provide adequate coverage of these topics. Why Point to Translate instead of Phonetic? The standard phonetic system for transcribing Mandarin is pinyin. However, pronouncing pinyin is very tricky. Consider the phrase, “I’m eating a goose.” The pinyin transcription is “wǒ chī é”, but the pronunciation is closer to “whua chee uh” - and that doesn’t even consider the complication of tonality. Thus, a verbal phrase-book style translation is not effective without at least a few hours of pinyin pronunciation training. Fortunately, written Chinese is standardized, even across 10 The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen China’s hundreds of regional dialects. Therefore, pointing at written translations is effective at communicating with anyone in China, even to people who speak a dialect other than Mandarin. Using the Guide The book is designed around enabling fast real-time interaction with locals. Translations are organized by component type or scenario, and the spiral binding allows the book to be easily left open to that page, so both parties can view the bilingual phrases with ease. The binding also allows the book to accommodate the extra thickness of business cards, which may be placed in the included pouches for quick access. The pouches are interleaved among several copies of a market map, allowing business cards (which are primarily printed in Chinese) to be easily matched with map annotations. This simplifies the problem of remembering a vendor’s location for repeat business. It’s generally recommended to bring printed specification drawings to the market, especially when sourcing switches, connectors, and other components with complex or arbitrary dimensions. While the vendors cannot speak English, most can read enough English characters to interpret a mechanical drawing. Each plastic business card holder sheet also has a larger pouch meant for storing folded up specification drawings. The tabs along the edge enable fast navigation between sections, and the elastic band on the back functions as a bookmark for quick access. All the pages can be torn out for easy sharing with friends and suppliers. Finally, this book never runs out of batteries, and is compatible with the most popular API in the market - printed name card, receipts, and drawings. It loads instantly bunnie 11 no matter where you are - the Great Firewall of China can’t filter it. You actually own your copy of this book - unlike software, it’s not licensed to you via a click-through EULA that robs you of all your fair use rights. It also can’t be infected with malware, has no pop-up ads, and will never upload confidential notes about pricing, sources, and vendors to the cloud. Your data is your data! About Technical Chinese As my friend Gavin Zhao once quipped, Chinese is a wonderful language for poetry, but difficult for precise technical communications. Fans of Randall Munroe’s XKCD may have seen the “Up-Goer Five” blueprint comic (http:// xkcd.com/1133/), where complex technical concepts are explained using only the “ten hundred” most common English words. Considering that 98% of Chinese is covered with only 2,500 characters, and there are only 7,000 “general use” characters, most technical terms in Chinese have to be decomposed into idioms that are reminiscent of the Up- Goer Five scenario. For example, a resistor is 电阻, which means “electric obstructor”, capacitor is 电容, which means “electric container”, and a computer is 电脑, which means “electric brain”. On the other hand, some concepts have names which are simply phonetic loan words with no meaning, such as the Schottky diode: 效特基二极管. The first three characters are “xiào tè jī” (sounds like “shao tuh gee”), which sound somewhat like “Schottky” but the characters mean “resembles particular basis/foundation”; clearly phonetic but no meaning. The last three characters mean “two-pole tube”, which does make some sense. And then there are the pronunciation subtleties, such as 芯片号, “xīn piàn hào” (which means an “IC’s part number” (literally “core flat item’s number”), which with misplaced accents sounds like 性偏好, “xìng piān hào” which means “sexual 12 The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen preference”. No native speaker would ever mispronounce or confuse the two, but a foreigner going up to a local asking “What’s your chip’s part number?” could be heard as “What’s your sexual preference?” if mispronounced and taken out of context. Even Mandarin speakers find it challenging to communicate certain technical terms. Different idioms are used, for example, between Taiwan and Shenzhen. There are other differences across China depending upon the dialect and context: academics will typically use more formal and technically rigorous terms than a market trader or even an engineer. For example, in the market the descriptive term 三 级管 (‘three-pole tube’) is sometimes used for a transistor, instead of the academically accepted 晶体管 (‘crystal tube’). Both of these could refer to a “metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor” (MOSFET), but there’s no uniform system for abbreviating 金属-氧化物-半导体型场效应管 (that’s Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor spelled out in Chinese characters). In this case, market traders will often fall back to using English acronyms or some local slang to refer to a given part. For this book, I’ve worked with my Chinese friends to produce translations that are targeted at the vernacular of traders in the Hua Qiang electronics market (of which many are from the city of Chaozhou (潮州市), and so speak a common dialect). If you do happen to find any errors or have suggestions for improvements, please send a note to [email protected]. What’s in the Market (And What’s Not) The Shenzhen electronics market is an amazing resource, but it’s not the be-all and end-all for sourcing electronic parts. As a general rule, if it’s not already in a product sold at Walmart, it’s probably not in this market. For example, bunnie 13 it’s hard to find analytical-grade sensors for quantities like pH, radiation and air quality. The selection of FPGAs is pretty dismal, and it’s not actually a great place to find microcontrollers – at least, not the types that Western- trained designers typically use. China has its own ecosystem of low-cost microcontrollers that are more popular with the locals. Also, given that the district sprang out of the ground in the 90’s, old or rare parts are hard to find, such as vacuum tubes or certain models of JFETs favored by elite audio engineers. For sourcing specialty parts, Taobao (taobao.com is China’s amalgamation of Amazon.com with eBay.com) is probably a better option than searching the physical markets. On the other hand, the market is brimming with parts found in any major mobile phone produced within the past decade. There are shelves loaded with cables, connectors, crystals, LEDs, diodes, transistors, resistors and capacitors. Generally, I find the market to be most effective for the following activities: • Sourcing “jellybean” parts (e.g., capacitors, resistors, and parts with non-critical specifications) • Finding cost-down alternatives to expensive switches and connectors – if there isn’t an exact replacement, there’s likely a functional equivalent at a tenth the price • Building an intuition for what’s hot on the market • Getting inspiration for making new products and finding new business opportunities The market is also heavily skewed toward electronics; there are some electromechanical components such as relays and motors, but not much.